Getting Started, Documentation, Tips & Tricks

Hamei, can you please stop shit posting? I'd rather not have to see ramblings about Icelandic dragons and you crying over consumerism in a forum dedicated to owning non-essentials items.

I have no idea why they find you amusing.

Sure, just scan your God license (use "browse" right below the dark blue line then "attach the file" would be easiest) and I'll be happy to follow your orders.

thanks

Yes, because it's just so awful for someone to not want you to post off topic, incendiary garbage.

"Off topic" does not violate the TOS here at Nekochan, and strong opinions notwithstanding hamei is one of the most helpful people here. Just my opinion. Which likewise does not violate the TOS.

Being helpful to some doesn't justify being an ass to others. I never mentioned the TOS, it's just generally understood that being a dick to someone who hasn't said anything to you is pretty crappy. But since he has 8k posts he has a nice little defense force that is determined to justify awful behavior. Sorry for interrupting the circlejerk.

how about a cut and a rewind so Feelies gets a nice start here

Definitely! We need people who know as much as Feelies obviously does so I'm happy to offer a heartfelt welcome aboard!

Not that you need to know as much as Feelies does in order to be welcome here, because, um, everyone has a different skill set, and-- Oh I give up...

Thinking about starting a collection

LOL, a collection is not something you plan, it's more something that grows organically. Like a virus

I think it starts for most people because they like to own something they used to work with when it was new, amazing and completely out of their (financial) reach. That's how I got my first Indy back in the nineties. You mess with it, if you like it you buy another, at some point you run out of space and sell the things that don't appeal to you anymore. Or you have to narrow your scope -- at some point I owned PA-RISC, SPARC and AXP hardware and a lot of SUN storage -- now it's only SGI (OK, I still have an IBM DS4000 SAN and a Dell PowerVault).

At least that's what happened to me -- and I own a fairly substantial collection of SGI's

So, go ahead and buy that one thing you always dreamed of owning. Then see where it goes from there. I hope you have some friends or better half to tell you when enough is enough

where are the days when the net was not full of whiny douchebags. friggin' unbelievable.

Moving back...

If you're starting your journey into alternative computing ("alternative" by modern standards), I'd give you a few pointers:

(1) Buy complete machines of the spec that you want. You can boost memory, HDD and the like easily, but some other parts have "gotchas" on them. It can also be more expensive to buy the parts than the whole machine. Sometimes there are also tricks to putting stuff in them without breaking things that you need to be aware of. Keep the projects for when you know more about what you're doing. Trust me, it's very frustrating to get a machine that you want to explore and find that it requires a hard-to-find bit that's very expensive.

(2) Stick with the original OSes. Yeah, it's a bit more work, but in most of these cases the OS was designed with the hardware, so it will help you to get a feel for what the original designers thought was important. While some are older than the models you list, HP-VUE, OpenLook/OpenWindows, SGI Indigo Magic, and Mac were all different takes on what a UI should be back when companies were still figuring that out.

I always admired SGI for declining to jump on the CDE bandwagon. Though I do have to admit that I greatly prefer mxterm over winterm...

the nice thing is on irix you can have both. the sgi desktop or cde ... however you feel

True, but why anyone would prefer CDE to Indigo Magic defies logical explanation...

I like CDE, personally, and I'd still pick SGI.

hehe yeah i guess most people wouldn't choose cde with irix but some multi platform installations used it to keep it uniform across different unix systems.

I remember the buzz when CDE first came out, it was supposed to finally make Unix be competitive with Windows in the business world. Then later so was KDE. Gosh! The memories...

haha true i remember running kde version 1 for testing purposes on the alpha. it sucked
cde was okay tho. especially with those extra buttons the sun keyboards had it was quite neat to use. that's actually the only good thing i remember from using solaris on the desktop

If I try to use any part of CDE this pops up:

Larry Ellison. Because he couldn't let Steve Ballmer be the *only* @$$hole in computing.(tm)

Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!

Or, in the case of Larry Ellison, DBAs! DBAs! DBAs! DBAs!